Saturday, April 9, 2011

IMMIGRATION IN GERMANY - NOOKS AND CORNERS

Immigration in GermanyHow a fresh debate on multiculturalism in Germany clashes with the country’s need for more immigrantsGood immigrants and bad, how many and of what kind are all worryingGermany just now. A book claiming that Muslim immigrants and theunderclass were bringing about Germany’s downfall by breeding too fasthad a print run of over a million by the end of September (and cost itsauthor, Thilo Sarrazin, his job on the Bundesbank board). Seeing itssuccess, politicians abandoned political correctness. Further immigrationfrom Turkey or Arabia is no longer welcome, said Horst Seehofer,Bavaria’s premier and head of the Christian Social Union (CSU), theBavarian arm of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. The CSUasked that immigrants embrace the Leitkultur (dominant culture). EvenMrs Merkel joined in. Multiculturalism—the idea that immigrants canrecreate their culture in Germany—has “utterly failed,” she said lastmonth. New polls confirm Germans’ hostility towards immigrants,especially Muslims.Awkwardly, Germany is bashing foreigners just when it needs them. Theworkforce is shrinking and growth is raising demand for skilled labour.Skills shortages cost the economy €15 billion ($21 billion) last year, saysRainer Brüderle, the liberal economy minister. He wants to import qualifiedworkers on a Canadian-style points system. Mr Seehofer is dubious. OnNovember 3rd Mrs Merkel held an “integration summit” to talk aboutimmigrants already in Germany. Next week the government will discussimmigration again.Even Germans who disagree with Mr Sarrazin praise him for drawingattention to a problem. Actually he may be making the situation worse.Some 15m people in Germany have a “migration background” (ie,immigrants or their offspring), second only to America. Some 4m areethnic Germans from the former communist block. But many others cameas guest workers in the 1950s and 1960s, especially from Turkey. Onindicators of social and economic health, these migrants lag. In Bremen,where more than half the young children are from migrant stock, they areless likely to go to kindergarten than native Germans. Just 8% of foreignteenagers are in vocational training, compared with 37% of Germans. In acity struggling to recover from a slump in shipbuilding, 16.4% of migrantswere unemployed in 2008, against 7.5% of native Germans. More than40% live below the poverty line, three times the rate for non-migrants.It is no surprise that joining the German mainstream is hard for children ofmanual labourers who were once expected to return home. In big citiesthey crowd together and go to schools from which native German childrenhave fled, making it harder to integrate, says Stefan Luft, a scholar at theUniversity of Bremen. Turks are especially prone to living in a parallelworld because there are so many of them. For too many immigrants thedole is an acceptable alternative to work. Islam can be an additionalbarrier, but only for Muslims who choose to make it one. One studyestimated that 10-12% of Muslims have radical Islamist leanings, and aquarter of Muslim teenagers are hostile to Christians and Jews or todemocracy.Germany awoke to such problems a decade or more before Mr Sarrazin’sscreed appeared. In 2000 it opened a pathway to citizenship. Since 2005immigrants can be required to take “integration courses,” including 600hours of instruction in German. Spouses from poorer countries must nowacquire a smattering of German before arrival.By some measures, indeed, Germany is in good shape. The unemploymentgap between foreigners and natives is narrower than elsewhere. The socialpolarisation that Mr Luft identifies “is not nearly as bad as in France”. Thefederal government has now drafted a law, long overdue, to recogniseforeign credentials. Some 300,000 underemployed immigrants could thenreturn to the professions for which they were trained. Rather thanimporting imams from Turkey and elsewhere the government wants themto be trained at German universities, which will impart modern valuesalongside religion.The debate provoked by Mr Sarrazin has unleashed a blast of culturalwarfare. The third of Germans who think the country is overrun withforeigners feel vindicated, though there is no net immigration. Themajority that want the practice of Islam curtailed invoke scholarly support.The Sarrazinites are raising the bar for judging integration a success. Itwould be nice if immigrants developed a sentimental attachment to theFatherland and its Leitkultur, but is it necessary? “Speaking the languageand having contacts with Germans is more important than feelingGerman,” says Ruud Koopmans of the Social Science Research Centre inBerlin.In Bremen the ugly turn in the debate makes it harder to achieve evenscaled-back integration. Co-operation with migrants has been “massivelydamaged,” says Mr Heintze. Mrs Cengiz says “many families are seriouslythinking about going back to Turkey.” Germany’s president, ChristianWulff, tried to undo the damage by saying that Islam “belongs toGermany”. But he is outshouted.Bremen, a city-state, wants a climate in which such pronouncements aretoo obvious to be worth making. In its schools migrants are the norm, not“a small group with special needs,” says Yasemin Karakasoglu of theUniversity of Bremen. At the city’s request she is designing a newcurriculum for training teachers, which may use a child’s mother tonguewhen necessary and also look for new ways to educate Muslim pupilsabout Germany’s crimes against Jews. Germans’ idea of what it is to beGerman will have to change too, she thinks. Bremers may be ready forthis. Most Germans, it seems, are not.